About this Author

College chemistry, 1983

The 2002 Model

After 10 years of blogging. . .

Derek Lowe, an Arkansan by birth, got his BA from Hendrix College and his PhD in organic chemistry from Duke before spending time in Germany on a Humboldt Fellowship on his post-doc. He's worked for several major pharmaceutical companies since 1989 on drug discovery projects against schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, diabetes, osteoporosis and other diseases.
To contact Derek email him directly: derekb.lowe@gmail.com
Twitter: Dereklowe

August 8, 2013

The 3D Fragment Consortium

Posted by Derek

Fragment-based screening comes up here fairly often (and if you're interested in the field, you should also have Practical Fragments on your reading list). One of the complaints both inside and outside the fragment world is that there are a lot of primary hits that fall into flat/aromatic chemical space (I know that those two don't overlap perfectly, but you know the sort of things I mean). The early fragment libraries were heavy in that sort of chemical matter, and the sort of collections you can buy still tend to be.

The UK-based 3D Fragment Consortium has a paper out now in Drug Discovery Today that brings together a lot of references to work in this field. Even if you don't do fragment-based work, I think you'll find it interesting, because many of the same issues apply to larger molecules as well. How much return do you get for putting chiral centers into your molecules, on average? What about molecules with lots of saturated atoms that are still rather squashed and shapeless, versus ones full of aromatic carbons that carve out 3D space surprisingly well? Do different collections of these various molecular types really have differences in screening hit rates, and do these vary by the target class you're screening against? How much are properties (solubility, in particular) shifting these numbers around? And so on.

The consortium's site is worth checking out as well for more on their activities. One interesting bit of information is that the teams ended up crossing off over 90% of the commercially available fragments due to flat structures, which sounds about right. And that takes them where you'd expect it to:

We have concluded that bespoke synthesis, rather than expansion through acquisition of currently available commercial fragment-sized compounds is the most appropriate way to develop the library to attain the desired profile. . .The need to synthesise novel molecules that expand biologically relevant chemical space demonstrates the significant role that academic synthetic chemistry can have in facilitating target evaluation and generating the most appropriate start points for drug discovery programs. Several groups are devising new and innovative methodologies (i.e. methyl activation, cascade reactions and enzymatic functionalisation) and techniques (e.g. flow and photochemistry) that can be harnessed to facilitate expansion of drug discovery-relevant chemical space.

And as long as they stay away from the frequent hitters/PAINS, they should end up with a good collection. I look forward to future publications from the group to see how things work out!